PUBLIC APOLOGY TO HAWAIIAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 36

First, allow me explore some dark scenarios with you - nightmares inspired by CNN then exploited by Fox News until you will hide under your bed whimpering and shaking for the rest of your limited and miserable existence.

Number one: H1N1 (previously called the "swine flu," but since that phrase didn't scare people enough and somehow restricted it to poor Mexicans who don't travel enough internationally to allow it to become a terrifying pandemic, it became H1N1, which is a WHOLE lot more frightening, reeking of control, test tubes, modified genes and government control - it also helps that a large monetary penalty applies to any news source which uses 'swine flu' instead of the shocking H1N1).

Here I think the major scare factor is that you can't really tell when you have H1N1 as opposed to a regular case of the flu (like Alzheimer's - diagnosed only when your brain is autopsied) BUT WITH H1N1 the chance that YOU ARE GOING TO DIE are so INCREDIBLY INCREASED like from 1.12% to 1.13% DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS YOU ARE GOING TO DIE DIE DIE and you aren't even going to KNOW IT IS H1N1 UNTIL AT YOUR FUNERAL!!

Number two: Terrorists - difficult as it is to keep the attention-deficit American public aware that there are still extremists who passionately believe in blowing up people (including themselves), the new image of fear is suicide-bombers targeting public areas where the public congregate - such as football stadiums, shopping malls, and the line to the only clean stall in the ladies restroom.

That is when terrorists will strike - something like anthrax dropped in the middle of the Super Bowl (just when the score is tied in the fourth quarter with 29 seconds left on the play clock and Houston has control of the ball) - or at the newest Target Enormément (the fourth in Venice, California this year) , a short man of uncertain but darker ancestry (wearing a baseball cap and a New England Patriots shirt - I have learned everything I know about criminals from NCIS, CSI and Law and Order) will be moving slowly through the crowd injecting each impatient customer individually with a rare and complex virus that IMMEDIATELY turns them into a mindless zombie who RUNS to Wal-Mart, purchases ALL the Charmin Toilet Paper and drive America insanely short of tissue choices.


Okay. Now back to my story.

So imagine a crowded flight of tourists... excuse me, visitors (the Hawaiian Visitor's Bureau feels that sounds better).... so a flight of crowded visitors.... um.... a visitor flight of crowds? Whatever - I was on an airplane for a long, long flight with a great number of other people (42% of Asian ethnicity, 31% military families, and the remaining 27% wearing tee shirts printed saying "Waikiki Forever" & "Kona Dry Goods").

And yes, I was that woman nosily expelling globs of nasal mucus into tissue after tissue after tissue - and then coughing and hacking and spitting up phlegm the entire seven hours of our flight, spending whatever cooties she had through each and every molecule of re-conditioned and shared 1.8 cubic feet of air per passenger throughout the entire airplane.

This is the only flight I wished had been crying infants and screaming toddlers to cover up all of the disgusting sounds I was producing.

And if 98% of the people scrunched in with me didn't think at least once about H1N2, close quarters, and this might be something more than a cold, I will eat my hat.

I think I was saved from a public lynching (or being locked into the smallest restroom) only by the mind-numbing in-flight movie of Eddie Murphy in Nickelodeon's "Imagine That" (hasn't the plot of overly-detached-father-figure ignores cute-little-girl-figure until magical-connection-or-curse joins-them-together been done about, what, three billion times now?).


Again, to all on that flight, my deepest and sincerest apologies to everyone who was on that flight.